(gentle music) - You know, I want to share one story with you.

It was a story told by Rabbi Kushner.

- I was doing an interfaith radio program one day, and I was introduced to the Protestant member of the panel, who told me he was pleased to meet me.

He was an evangelical, and he just had a healing service for people with AIDS, and they used a reading for my book.

I hear him say healing service, evangelical, and I say to myself, "Oh boy, I've got an Oral Roberts on my hands here."

So I said to him somewhat sarcastically, "Oh, I didn't know you could cure AIDS with prayer."

- The minister said, "Oh, you misunderstand me.

We were praying for this young man who, when he learned he was diagnosed with AIDS and shared it with his roommate, his roommate threw all of his possessions out on the street and threw him out of the apartment, and so we were praying for the healing of that man's relationship with his roommate.

And when his parents learned that he had AIDS, they disowned him and said that he was no longer their son."

- We weren't curing anything.

We were healing the relationship between the person with AIDS and his family, healing the relationship between the person with AIDS and the most important person in his life.

- They were praying for the relationship with the man with himself, who was racked with guilt and self-loathing and self-hating for creating a situation where he would be exposed to AIDS.

And he said, "We let the disease, we leave the disease to God's hands, but we're praying for the healing of these relationships that have breached."

I think that's a universal story that particularly in those early years of AIDS, it really says a lot about what gay men were going through in this crisis.

They were left without loved ones, without family, hating themselves and dying alone, until a community of people stood up and said, "We have to make a difference."

- We are here to celebrate Club Cabaret's incredible achievement.

$250,000 raised for AmFAR's programs in AIDS research.

- We decided to start sending money to AmFAR right after the Kansas City Free Health Clinic, and that's when AmFAR really was taking effect.

That was Elizabeth Taylor's foundation, so it just made perfect sense that that's where it was gonna go.

I used to own a restaurant on Westport Road and Main Street.

We called it The Bridge.

I would dress up like Flo from the show "Alice" and go to the Cabaret and pass out free appetizers, buy one get one this, or whatnot.

I remember the first time I went to the Cabaret, I sat out in my car and was scared to death to walk in there, not knowing that night that someday I would work there for many, many years.

There were Beer Bus all throughout the city, but everybody knew at whatever time from their bars that they went to, Tootsie's and Sidekicks or SideStreet or whatever, Flo show's getting ready to start.

♪ Flo was a mighty voyage gal ♪ ♪ With Roger Cast in tow ♪ ♪ 20 drag queens set sail that day for a three hour show ♪ ♪ The weather started getting rough ♪ ♪ The tiny ship was tossed ♪ ♪ If not for the courage of the fearless Flo ♪ ♪ The FR would be lost ♪ ♪ Her ship set ground on the shore ♪ ♪ Of this uncharted desert isle ♪ ♪ With Captain Flo and Roger, too ♪ ♪ Her big, mean boss and his wife ♪ ♪ Miss Desiree, the stage crew and Yopie and ♪ ♪ Here on Cabaret Island ♪ - [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, Flo!

- They would keep the doors locked on purpose to get into that big room, to build that anticipation, and people would sit along the walls all the way down the hallways to be able to get in there first.

And I used to, it was my favorite thing to do, I would go up in the DJ booth because it was dark up there and I'd watch them open the doors and I could watch the people run in.

That brought me so much joy.

- In Kansas City, there are about 4,500 people who have been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS.

More than half of them are alive today.

- The main thing I remember is going to what at that time was the health department.

Going in there for one thing, which was a rash, kind of like a rash or raised bumps on my neck and then having different tests being done, and then just being told I was HIV positive.

I wasn't even going to figure out if I was positive or not.

I didn't think the rash had anything to do with it.

It was just, you're positive.

That's it.

- HIV itself caused fatigue, GI problems, diarrhea, histoplasmosis, cryptococcal meningitis, esophageal candidiasis.

So thrush that you would see in the mouth would actually go down the throat into the esophagus, made people very ill. And then you gave them meds, which were, I don't know that they were toxic, but they definitely had a lot of symptoms associated with them.

They could have side effects that were pretty awful for them.

- I just remember that we had to take, I don't remember exactly how many it was.

I just remember it was, to me, it seemed like a handful of pills, and we had to take them every four hours.

I used to often get asked, "Well, do you have to take them even while you're sleeping?"

I'm like, "Yeah, we have to clock every four hours."

I really wasn't adherent to the drug regimens, which in that instance probably was a good thing, because I probably would not be sitting here having this interview with you (laughing).

I say that because it didn't create a buildup of that in my system, where a lot of people that were adherent and taking it all the time like they should be taking it or like they would being told to take it, it builds up their system.

That would cause a lot of the complications as to why a lot of people died.

- People lost jobs and people lost housing.

People would be kicked out of apartments because it became known they had AIDS.

- Housing was, you know, if we don't have stable housing, nothing works.

The problem with AIDS early on that people were being put out of their houses or they were being put in attics.

We had so many stories of people who didn't have a place to stay.

The SAVE Foundation was originally established to support the Good Samaritan house.

The board really wanted to improve the surroundings because people were starting to stay longer.

So, I wrote a grant.

I typed the grant on the typewriter my mother gave me when I graduated from high school in 1970, and it was actually for nursing home facilities, something like that.

About three weeks later, I got a call from someone and he said, "Who in the hell are you people?"

And I was like, "We provide nursing care for people with a chronic disease."

And he said, "Is this HIV/AIDS?"

And I said, "Yes, sir."

He said, "Well, I'm coming to see you, because somebody in Washington told me I had to."

He came over and he said, "Wow, this is it, huh?"

And I said, "Yes."

He said, "Well, you asked for funding to sort of make some improvements here," and the rest is history.

So he became a real strong advocate for us.

We were able to renovate.

We ended up reducing the amount of bedrooms, but it was a much more accommodating space.

The kitchen became huge, because that was all that, later, that's where Elizabeth Taylor sat, and we put the chair up on the wall, because no one ever sat in that again.

No one was ever allowed to sit in that chair again.

- I don't know exactly the origins for the model that was used to create the AIDS Service Foundation, but it was brilliant.

At the time it was created, there were four primary AIDS Service Organizations in Kansas City.

The Good Samaritan Project, SAVE Inc, HARCMart and Kansas City Free Health Clinic.

- Everybody was asking the same donor pool for support of the AIDS fight.

- The AIDS Service Foundation was a way to try to end that competition and create a collaborative fundraising vehicle that would raise money for all four organizations and then equally distribute the money out.

- Steve and Sandra Schermerhorn and some of the other like-minded people decided to put the foundation together, and that they would have one fundraiser, being at that time Walk for Life, today's AIDS Walk.

- The eighth Annual AIDS Walk for Life is the single largest fundraiser benefiting AIDS/HIV research in Kansas City, and walkers have raised more than a half million dollars for research and care over the past seven years.

- It had actually been a function of, at the time, Good Samaritan Project.

Good Samaritan Project gave the foundation, so to speak, the walk to do this fundraising through as a vehicle.

That is when, I think for those four or five years, it was all the volunteers from all the different organizations trying to make sure that the walk at the time was successful.

- I remember a friend of a friend said, "I'd like to take you and show you something."

He took me to a house, and while we were there, this pickup truck came up, and there was this elderly gentleman got out of it, and his son was just in the back of the pickup truck, and he helped him out and just sort of left him.

I'll never to my dying day forget that moment.

I mean, seeing the condition that he was in and that his father would just drive off and leave him there.

So, that impression then stayed with me, and that was sort of where I think I really got involved with DIFFA.

(soft music) Kansas City formed a DIFFA chapter, and as our second major fundraiser, there was an event touring nationally that was called "Heart Strings, an Event in Three Acts."

It was a traveling show that had been put together out of New York.

As a thank you for the patrons who had paid the most to come to the event, we decided that we needed to probably have some sort of thank you before event that turned into being a sit-down dinner.

We could not afford to do tables all alike.

I would simply ask different creative people that I knew, because at that time, the whole DIFFA chapter was pretty much made up of florists and designers and architects and all sorts of creative people.

So each person simply did their own table, so it turned into be quite interesting.

The next year when we decided that we were gonna do our own fundraiser locally, we decided, okay, we would build Dining by Design.

- I remember when we started AmFAR, we got so much grief, a lot from our own community, that we were taking the money from Kansas City and sending it to New York when they wanted it to stay local.

My thought was that I want to put AIDS Walk out of business.

I want to put SAVE Inc. or Hospice, whatever, my job was to put you out of business.

The only way we, that I knew how to do it, was to send that money to AmFAR, because they were only doing research.

In my head, I was like, "If you're already in a hospice, it's too late."

Cut it before you get there.

So we're sending that money to New York, and some of that money went to do some funding right here in Kansas City, but who cares if you found the cocktail mix and what they were all trying to do and it was at some other state university or whatnot.

It eventually got to us.

It was very controversial that we were taking thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sending it away.

- Just a second.

You were diagnosed as HIV positive in 1990.

- October of '91.

- And how are you doing?

- I'm doing fine.

There are no signs of any illnesses that come along with the disease as of this time, which I'm very thankful for.

- You were telling me before we went on that one of the reasons you're nervous is just speaking about your status here with the disease.

Why have you elected to increase your profile and talk about this on citywide TV here?

- Because I think that it's very important, because as we all have seen and we all find out that there is a lack of education out there, and we need to have people speak out.

Yes, it does cause me to be nervous a great deal, but I know that it's important and needs to be done.

Another part of that really, I guess you could say lit a fire for me was I wanted to be the voice for those who could not speak up for themself or who were afraid to speak up for themself.

Part of those people were the Latin community.

Torean Walker was my mentor when I first got involved in the whole HIV arena.

Him and another gentleman by the name of AC, we got labeled the Three Musketeers.

I think we all three had that fire, that passion inside of us, and it was just like we were going to do what we needed to do, whether you liked it or not.

We wanted to make sure that our respective populations, the communities, but you know, it wasn't so much a separation thing.

It was like, because AC and Torean are both African American, I'm Latino.

We just see people that need help.

- We also started seeing a shift in the population.

In 1992, 8% of the population we served were African American.

By the end of 1994, it was 50%.

- The issues when I arrived here in Kansas City included things like both the African American and Hispanic communities feeling like not enough funding was being directed on the prevention side or on the Ryan White side.

The Ryan White Planning Council is something that was written into the Federal Ryan White Legislation, and it was intended as a way to ensure that community had a voice in how dollars were spent.

- I really liked to actually see and to be a part of the decision-making process and to actually be able to help determine where the monies are going to go.

I wanted to be able to help bridge that gap in making sure that they got equal representation as far as funds were concerned and things that were gonna help that population.

- When I first went in and started working in the clinic, I became introduced to drug reps.

These are people who work for drug companies.

Keeping in mind we only had AZT and a couple of other drugs.

They became very invaluable as far as helping me educate patients.

And one day, one of the reps happened to be sitting in my office when I got a call from an emergency room doctor at St. Joseph's Hospital in St. Joe, Missouri.

The doctor wanted to know if we had any IV AZT, because they had a pregnant patient who had not been in care but who came in labor and they needed to give her this IV drug and they didn't have it.

So I put them on hold.

I called down to the pharmacy.

Yes, they had some IV AZT, and they would send it via state patrol.

Then I got a call back from pharmacy.

The state patrol was unavailable.

They had multiple wrecks they were overseeing, so it would be hours before they could take the drug.

So the drug rep, AZT was not his drug, but he said, "I'll take it up."

The drug rep took the IV AZT to St. Joe to give to that patient, who he probably would never get credit for in his sales district because the patient wasn't on his drug.

But that was what we saw, that generosity of drug reps at that time to do the most they could.

- The Requiem Project was an early effort to bring the social country club crowd and corporate community into the fight against AIDS.

They put on a concert that was written by a Kansas City man, A Requiem for AIDS.

It was a beautiful concert by the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra.

That was kind of one of my first exposures to Steve Metzler before I met him.

Steve's epithet on his grave marker is "Changing the world one cocktail party at a time."

He loved to bring together people from diverse backgrounds and different perspectives and bring them together to help make a difference around things that were important to him.

The Requiem Project and Dining By Design were really very early successful events in raising money outside of the gay community, which really was important at that time.

- From the early days of my work with the foundation and the walk, I didn't have any great knowledge, but I could tell it was going to take the whole city, not just a small group of people that were directly infected to make a difference.

And so you look at it, and I certainly did look at it as a campaign, and how do you go about putting this basics of a campaign together?

You bring in as many community groups that you can.

Del Hall was very supportive of our efforts, and I can remember her telling Steve Metzler and I that you have to tell your story over and over and over to everybody that will listen.

- We'd maybe been doing the Flo's Beer Bus for a couple years.

Dunbrook got a call and said we would like to hire Flo to come to a private birthday party.

John Brooks said, "Well, Flo doesn't do private shows.

If you want to see Flo, you have to come to the Sunday Beer Bust."

And so the guy had told him, "We haven't missed a show, and this is probably gonna be his last time he has," I'm gonna cry.

(John exhaling) This is back when we had strippers.

I remember one of the strippers, I'd worked with him a lot, so I knew him pretty well, and I said, "Hey, we're gonna go do this birthday party."

It kind of had to be in the winter because it was freezing cold, because they had us sitting out on the porch because they had to go move the coffee table.

This is when we had boom boxes and cassette tapes.

I remember handing him my cassette tape and I came in to "Knock on Wood."

I remember the song to this day, did my thing.

He was crying and we made his birthday.

I said, "Oh, I'm not your birthday present."

I said, "This is your," and I brought him in and he did his thing for him.

In December, I got a card at the Cabaret that he had passed away.

That's when I realized what we were doing was way bigger than us.

- We as a design community, none of us had much money to do anything with, but we decided that we had contacts.

We did the hair of Mrs. Whatever.

We did the interior of whatever.

We did the landscape of whomever.

So we had clients that had abilities, we thought, to give funds.

I can't remember how it came about, but we got a quote "audience" in front of Muriel Kauffman.

We sat down in front of her, and she was very matter of fact and kind of said, "Okay, what do you guys need?

What are you up to?"

We kind of stumbled through this whole thing of what we were trying to do, raise money for AIDS, and we were doing this event and so forth in Kansas City, and we needed an honorary chair and if she would do that.

Because at that time, no one of name had put their name to an AIDS fundraiser at all.

So we thought if we could get her to do that, we would've crossed a great line.

I remember she just kind of leaned across the table and put her hands on it and kind of said, "Count me in."

I'm sorry.

That was extremely meaningful to us that she did that, and she gathered her troops, and that's partly why we were able to have a great success that year.

- You know, in all the time that I was there for 10 years, we never had anyone protest, but we did have protestors when we started putting up the new buildings.

There was a very active, two active neighborhood groups that didn't get along with each other right in covering the area where we built Cropsey.

Karl Cropsey was actually the highest ranking official to ever speak on behalf of gays in the military.

He carried Windex.

If I saw him coming, I would say, "Oh my gosh, you guys, get the windows clean.

He's on his way."

He scared me to death.

He was great.

He'd been a hero, and no one would ever have guessed that.

At that point, the population had transitioned to more behavioral health issues.

We needed to be able to provide stable housing that had options for people to actually get balanced and move on.

People had a future.

They actually had a future.

- There's a quote in the health department that reads, "Every disease has two causes, one biological, the other is political."

And at this point, it's not a matter of information.

It's a matter of people being willing to open their minds and open their hearts.

- I think the Cabaret success was the perfect storm.

People were dying.

People didn't understand AIDS.

We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have Grindr, and that was our home.

Everybody knew somebody who had AIDS.

I think the only thing that I want to stress to people who weren't around during the Cabaret days is what we did.

Not what we did, what the entertainers did.

It really is 100% the entertainers and the people who believed in the entertainers and wrote those checks.

That was the Cabaret.

(soft music) - We couldn't stop the horrible devastation of the disease, but we could help ease the suffering and pain and the loneliness caused by it.

I think that on the whole, Kansas City did a fairly good job of stepping up and making a difference.

Sometimes we were slower to respond than we should have been, but I think that we did a very good job of responding to the AIDS crisis.

- I remember coming out of the Cabaret and having a brick thrown at me by a car passing by and screaming, "Fags."

Well, that's really easy for somebody to just go, "I'm not doing this anymore," but we don't do that.

We fight.

I think that's what made the Cabaret Beer Bus, is that we were fighting for our lives.

(gentle music) This is Polly Holiday,and she found out about the show, the Sunday Beer Bus.

She autographed this and sent it to me and it says, "To Flo from the real thing, Polly Holiday."

She put this, it came just like this.

She just didn't slap it in an envelope.

She actually did all this for me, so this is probably one of my prized possessions.